Quick Degree Finder

Robert Korzeniewski, left, mentors job seeker Robert Mendez on his search. Korzeniewski is the volunteer leader at the Career Network Ministry at the McLean Bible Church in Northern Virginia. He holds sessions in local restaurants and oversees the CNM's weekly meeting.

MCLEAN, Va.  On stage in front of a crowded room of job seekers at the McLean Bible Church, Bob Korzeniewski asks for volunteers to step up and recite the 30-second pitch they'll use on prospective employers.

The role-playing is a familiar practice for job hunters, but the weekly sessions at the Career Network Ministry reach beyond timeworn employment strategies.

Korzeniewski and a team of volunteers are counseling the unemployed in the new skill set needed to land a job in this competitive job market.

While a sales pitch and a good résumé are vital, Korzeniewski emphasizes the importance of social networking — online and in person — in an environment that also has a spiritual component.

"Our goal is to find five jobs where someone carries your résumé in. If we do that, we're going to have success in one of those five. Let's get you from the résumé game into the networking game," Korzeniewski says.

Developing the skills to play the networking game is happening not just in this room but all over the country.

The website Meetup, which helps users organize any sort of gathering around shared interests from dog walking to sailing, has more than 1,400 career network groups nationally.

But those gathered here are learning from a real pro who uses his own networking skills to bring in volunteers from top companies to coach.

Korzeniewski is a former executive vice president for VeriSign, one of the largest providers of Internet security and domain registrations.

A 53-year-old philanthropist, he got involved when he saw that the need was real and about to grow.

Many unemployed people have not had to think about looking for a job for a long time.

"Some of them come for spiritual content, maybe some of them come for some mentoring and a lot of them come because there is good practical advice," Korzeniewski says.

Book of recommendations

That advice is highlighted in the 50-page handbook that Korzeniewski and a core group of volunteers wrote. Recommendations include:

•Prayfor guidance. The weekly meeting is open to anyone who is unemployed or wants to volunteer.

•Get a marketing strategy. Research where you want to work and identify your strengths.

•Prepare your elevator pitch. Practice stating who you are and what you can do in a clear and memorable 30-second pitch.

•Get help with your résumé You may want to have several versions, each tailored to a specific job.

•Make business cards. Use a phrase or an image to give your cards personality and make sure they're appropriate to the industry you are targeting.

•Evaluate your personal network. Make a list with contact information for relatives, neighbors, classmates, community leaders and co-workers — anyone who can serve as a contact for you.

•Create a profile on LinkedIn. That's the social-networking site for professionals. Other useful social-media sites include Facebook and Twitter.

Korzeniewski stresses that being prepared to network is key. You need to decide what you want to do, where you want to do it and what your strengths are. If you are not prepared and impressive, you can do more harm than good.

"Once we have those tools," Korzeniewski says, "we have to engage in networking, and the difference is going to be networking."

E-networking removes the awkwardness that many people feel reaching out to contacts in person.

LinkedIn not only allows you to search for contacts at your target companies, it also automatically scans the LinkedIn network for people who have something in common with your profile.

With executives from all Fortune 500 companies as members, LinkedIn is a virtual community of 65 million. Members share and search enhanced online résumés and job postings, monitor discussions and follow who else is making connections and with whom.

"In the old days, the saying was, 'It's not what you know, but who you know,' " says Robert Mendez, a Career Network Ministry volunteer and social-media expert. "In today's Internet age, it's not who you know, it's who they know."

The importance of a LinkedIn profile is new territory for many in the room. Volunteers with laptops draw a crowd when they help set up profiles for attendees. They are taught what sorts of information to put on their profiles and how to make contacts in the online world.

Traditionally, people tended to deal with unemployment on their own, Korzeniewski says. Unemployment wouldn't last long, and they could handle it themselves. Long-term unemployment has become a serious problem in the recession. A record 45.9% of those unemployed have been out of work more than 27 weeks, the government reported Friday.

Korzeniewski encourages job seekers to think of anyone they have a personal connection to as a contact. All the parents of your child's classmates, for example.

"We tell people: Someone internally carries your résumé in, whether they know you well or not, the probability of getting a job goes up five times." Good companies get 30% to 50% of their hires from employee referrals.

Positioning yourself

David Peirce of Reston, Va., got the job he wanted in April as the director of business development operations at McNeil Technologies, a government services specialist. The skills he learned at CNM helped him land the job, he says.

"It used to be you were more effective if you were good at making calls, but in the last 18 months, you've had this huge surge in using things like LinkedIn and Facebook to find your six degrees of separation from your target," Peirce says.

Peirce was able to cover a lot more ground and position himself with the companies he wanted to target. He was actually hired by former co-workers he had lost touch with, connecting with them through his social-media network.

"When I used to get the requests to (join) LinkedIn, as a cybersecurity manager, I was reluctant to do that," Peirce says. "I used to reject those. In the last 18 months, that's the way everything is going. Security is better, and it's a tool for getting your profile out there and getting connected a lot quicker."

Peirce has become a social-media believer. He's decided to become a Career Network Ministry volunteer while he keeps building his network. From now on, he says, he'll keep his LinkedIn profile up to date.

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